Blogtrek

Some interesting news stories

This has been some day! There has been some interesting news stories out, in locations I can't exactly remember. However, these stories are news because they seem amazing, but they are true. Or at least you can take a look at these and see what you think:

1. (2004 April 1 - AP) Asteroid to hit the Earth in 2008

Astronomers at Mt. Palomar Telescope have discovered an asteroid that is apparently going to collide with Earth in 2008. It is Asteroid 2004 EB, an Amor object, with a diameter somewhat over 3 miles. Initial observations and calculations show this object has a high carbon and possibly hydrocarbon content and is headed for a 300,000 miss of Earth in 2008. However, one of the astronomers saw the tell-tale lines of hydrocarbons very much like coal and petroleum on it, leading him to predict that the asteroid will strike Earth instead. He said, "If that asteroid has oil in it, then with gasoline prices and crude oil prices as high as they are, you can bet that nuclear explosions soon will drive that asteroid straight into the Earth."

2. (2004 April 1 - Reuters) Largest Prime Number Discovered

Mathematicians at Berkeley and Stanford, along with mathematicians in India, have discovered the largest prime number. It is described by a complicated formula in 327 pages and is 282,421,906 digits long. By combining a theorem describing ideals in K-theory with a bifurcation of a 23-dimensional manifold with a Haar measure, they isolated five classes of prime numbers and found an upper bound for each. The largest of the numbers is the Berkeley-Stanford-India number. Therefore, no prime numbers larger than this number will ever be found, and hence there are only a finite number of prime numbers, forming a set called the BSI set.

Dr. Yousef Clidinat of Southeastern University has some serious doubts about the proof, however, and he has resolved to find a larger prime number. His plan is to multiply all the prime numbers in the BSI set, about 200 million of them, and add 1. He has already calculated the result, but has had difficulty finding prime factors of the resulting number. He is confident of finding such a number soon, however, and insists that when he finds it, it will not be in the BSI set.

3. (2004 April 1 - Arrow News Service) The Best Government is a Dictatorship

One of the landmark events in human history has been the development of democratically elected governments. The idea that everyone by right has a voice in the government of a nation is now well established, and has resulted in countries in which people are free to live fulfilling lives. So it came as a shock to the Outbox Group think tank when its members discovered that, given reasonable assumptions, the best government is a dictatorship, wherein one person determines all the rules. The group made four rather reasonable assumptions, namely:

a. Given preferences from the citizens, there shall always be a societal decision. Otherwise, the government is indecisive.

b. If society decides on one alternative over another, then it shall decide on that one over the other if nothing happens to the preferences of the civilians except things that favor that one alternative over the other.

c. If society decides on one alternative over another, then it shall make that same decision even if how the individuals decide on other, irrelevant options is changed to something completely different.

d. For any two alternatives, there shall be a set of individual preferences that decide the first of these over the second. Else for all sets of preferences, society favors the second one, which means that this preference is imposed upon society from the outside, something rather undesirable.

The group, headed by Prof. Knuth Javelin, showed that these reasonable assumptions imply that there exists an individual such that what that individual says goes for all of society. In other words, this guy is a dictator.

The group is busy trying to find a flaw in the proof before all the democracies in the world find out and the dictators say, "I told you so."

4. (2004 April 1 - Bingby celebrity service) Michael Jackson is an extraterrestrial

Biologists in California have performed research on Michael Jackson's DNA in preparation for his child molestation case, and they have decided, based on what they found, that Michael Jackson is an extraterrestrial. "The genes and alleles in his DNA resemble absolutely nothing that is normally in human DNA.", said one of the researchers. He declined to comment on how he arrived on Earth, however, and it is unclear what the implications are for his case.